Immigration and Linguistic Diversity: A New and Poorly Understood Situation for Catalan

Comellas-Casanova, Pere

International Journal of Multilingualism, v13 n2 p149-164 2016

For decades Catalan, a language minoritized and endangered by the hegemony of other state languages, has been experimenting with a process of revitalization driven by social activism and political autonomy, which has been particularly strong in some of its historical regions. Recently, however, serious doubts about the success of this process have been heightened due to a surge of immigrants that speak neither Catalan nor Spanish. This article attempts to assess the impact of immigrant languages on the future of the linguistic dynamic using demographic evidence. We raise the question of whether this is a key factor to Catalan's survival, and finally demonstrate that the underestimation of alloglots in statistical studies is an indicator of the need to expand the study of the phenomenon of the new linguistic diversity, which exceeds the traditional framework of bilingual settings.